The Big Winner

May 11th, 2008 by admin

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip - one of the most popular comic strips and media properties of all time - wrote a blog post explaining the benefits of persistence and dedication throughout his life. The blog post got deleted but is included in his book Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain. I also found a mirror here:In Over My Head by Scott Adams

Some excerpts:

“When Dilbert was only in about fifty newspapers, and I still had my day job, I got a call from a meeting organizer in Calgary asking if I wanted to give a speech – preferably a funny one – to a bunch of engineers. I had spoken to small groups before, generally at my day job. And I had taken the Dale Carnegie course, but that only involved giving speeches to my 40 classmates. It was a long way from standup comedy in Canada. But they offered to pay me $5,000 U.S., which got my attention. I figured the worst thing that could happen is that I would embarrass myself in Canada. So I flew to Canada, showed them some comics that had gotten me in trouble and told witty stories. They loved me. That was about 300 paid speeches ago. I can’t tell you my current price, but the biggest offer I ever turned down was $100,000 to do a one-hour speech for a tech company. (I had prior commitments.)

…

“Several years ago I was approached by some advisors for people in high places. I can’t give you the details of this story, or even tell you why I can’t give you the details. But the gist of it was that they needed help squelching some bad ideas that had taken hold in the public consciousness. They thought humor might be one part of the solution, and they were Dilbert fans, so they tracked me down. The challenge was that the bad ideas sounded terrific to the uninformed person. You couldn’t kill these particular bad ideas with logic because the arguments against them would be too complicated. You had to go in through the back door. I suggested a few cleverly designed, hypnosis-inspired phrases that were the linguistic equivalent of Kung Fu. They were simple (that’s my specialty), and once you heard these phrases, they made any competing ideas seem frankly stupid. Think of Johnny Cochran’s famous refrain “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” In my opinion, O.J. is a free man largely because of that phrase. My phrases worked the same way. The people in high places tried my phrases. The phrases became world headlines the next day. I could tune the TV to any news channel and hear my words coming out of pundits’ mouths. The phrases smothered the competing ideas and just maybe changed the course of world events. (One can never knowfor sure.)”